Poetry and Works
| This quote, from Chen to a friend, shows his attitude as a formative poet of the Early Period of Tang poetry:
The art of letters has been declining for five hundred years....In my leisure hours, I have looked into the poems of the Ch'i and Liang Dynasties, and I could not help sighing when I found all genuine feeling and insight were smothered by meaningless figures of speech and squeamish refinement of words. So much rhetoric and so little sentiment! When will the grand tradition of Shih Ching revive? |
Chen Zi'ang is well known for his collection of thirty-eight poems "Ganyu" (感遇), written in a simpler vocabulary than typified the poetry of that time and which were heavily influenced by Daoism. He has one poem in the Three Hundred Tang Poems, translated by Witter Bynner as "On a Gate-tower at Yuzhou"
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